Fox News’ Baier Rebukes Mollie Hemingway’s Defense of Pruitt: He Tried to Get Wife a Job at Chik-fil-A

Scott Pruitt finally succumbed to the mountain of bizarre scandals he’s been carrying for the past few months, and “resigned” as head of the EPA. The anti-anti-Trump brigade was quick to come to Pruitt’s defense, 13 investigations into his conduct be damned.

Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway appeared on Fox News to provide her own (quite limp) defense of the outgoing Trump cabinet member.

“There’s no question that Scott Pruitt showed some bad judgment, but many of these things… are overblown, some of these things that he’s been accused of are outright false,” Hemingway said, citing a botched New York Times report on Pruitt using his position for favors.

Hemingway said the reason there was a “massive, orchestrated campaign” to get rid of Pruitt because he was “effective in his job.”

“Let me just interrupt you,” Fox News anchor Bret Baier said. “You have to concede that seeing an EPA administrator reach out to somebody to try to get his wife a Chik-fil-A franchise is not an everyday thing.”

Baier added that Republican lawmakers had lost confidence in Pruitt.

“Right, as I said he has shown some bad judgment,” Hemingway replied, “but he wasn’t under attack for the entirety of this administration because he had shown some bad judgment. The campaign that was funded by so many of these environmental groups was about going over every decision he made, every casual comment he made with a fine tooth comb, so they could oust him.”

The Washington Post‘s Karen Tumulty was less generous to Pruitt.

“Guy [Benson] said death by a thousand cuts. I would call it suicide by a thousand cuts,” Tumulty said. “All of this was self-inflicted. The guy was a grifter. He was continuing to just rack up one embarrassment after another for a president who had come to town promising to change things the way things got done in Washington, to drain the swamp. And he became a symbol of the swamp.”

“I think actually though what he really had was a lot of opposition, even within the administration,” Hemingway maintained.

Tumulty noted that Pruitt spent nearly $3,000 on “tactical pants,” and Hemingway contended the official “was under extreme threat from people who were threatening his physical safety” from “radicals.”

[image via screengrab]

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